By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) – A prosecutor in Texas asked the state’s highest criminal court on Tuesday to overturn a pardon granted by Gov. Gregg Abbott to a former U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder and sentenced to prison for the deadly shooting of a Black Lives Matter protester.
Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, a Democrat whose office handled the murder case, said he had asked the state Court of Criminal Appeals for a special order, called a writ of mandamus, to overturn Abbott’s action.
Garza told a news briefing in the state capital of Austin that Abbott, a Republican, had violated the separation of powers doctrine in the state Constitution and failed to follow proper legal procedures in the way he Daniel Perry pardoned last month.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment on Garza’s move.
Perry, convicted last year, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fatally shooting Garrett Foster, a U.S. Air Force veteran, in July 2020 during the protest against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis months earlier.
Foster, 28, was white, like Perry.
Perry, then 37, insisted he acted in self-defense and opened fire because Foster brandished an AK-47 rifle at him. The trial produced conflicting stories about whether Foster pointed his gun at Perry.
Prosecutors said Foster, who was legally armed at the time, approached Perry’s car to protect his fellow protesters, believing Perry might attack them with his vehicle.
The jury sided with Perry, whose case became a cause for political conservatives.
On May 16, Abbott, acting immediately on the recommendation of the state pardon board, granted a full pardon to Perry, citing the state’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense laws, one of the strongest such measures in the US.
On Tuesday, Garza told reporters that the administration and Abbott had “put politics above justice and made a mockery of the justice system.”
The prosecutor said Abbott exceeded his authority by intervening in the murder case before allowing the appeal to proceed, thereby “forbidding the judiciary from doing its job.”
Aside from the separation of powers issue, Garza told reporters that the administration and the governor did not follow the pardon rules set by law, adding: “They didn’t even get into the close to meeting those standards.”
When Foster’s mother, Shiela Foster, appeared with Garza on Tuesday, she vowed that her family would “fight this until we get justice for Garrett.”
Garza filed his subpoena a week after the attorneys general of 13 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, all Democrats, urged the U.S. Justice Department to open a federal civil rights investigation into Foster’s killing.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
